As soon as I finished the quilt for my one-year-old nephew, I had two more to make for two new nephews! That’s right, my sister-in-law had twin boys this past winter. My mother-in-law now has five grandchildren, and only one of them is a singleton.

I like to make twin quilts coordinated-but-not-matchy, as a general rule. They are, after all, two unique people. Should they not have their own quilts? And yet, there’s no denying that twins – identical or not – have a particular connection to one another that is more than just your typical sibling. So maybe their quilts should have a little extra connection, too.

Or maybe that’s just me over-thinking things.

At any rate, these are both made from 6″ (finished) half-square triangle blocks, and they’re both half solids, half prints. But the layouts and the colors and the quilting are different.

I even seem to have “assigned” them reasonably well. The red/gray(green) quilt is a bit bolder and louder, as is baby O. The yellow/teal feels a bit more mellow, which fits nicely with baby A. Yay for that!

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Another in the list of projects-left-hanging was this star quilt I had partially assembled when I last posted here. I finally finished it this past December, and gave it to my nephew, Miles. Much to my dismay, Miles was a full year old by the time he had a quilt from his aunt Liz. SHAMEFUL, I say.

At any rate, I was quite pleased with this one. I loved the different-sized wonky stars and the bright yellow on that deep blue background.

Given that it was the first thing I’d sewn in close to two years, I was really happy with how the quilting turned out. I did a really loose, open, loopy meander with gray thread in the blue areas of the quilt, and the stars got a denser treatment in yellow.

For as much as I have loved pieced backs in the past, I was glad that this one only required a single cut of fabric. One less thing in the way of it getting finished!

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Yeah, so I apparently haven’t posted here in over two years. Unfortunately, that’s almost as long as I went away from my sewing machine. Oh sure, since I last posted, we moved into a new house. And while our new house is larger than our old one, I didn’t have an actual place-to-sew like I did before. But last fall, we finished our basement, and now I have a huge, wonderful space for sewing. And lo, I even remember how to use my machine!

A lot of what I’ve been sewing for the last couple of months has been catching up on long-abandoned projects. For instance, I actually put together bee blocks into a quilt top for the FIRST TIME EVER.

I also got my Quilts of Valor quilt finished. That one was only 2 1/2 years overdue! I even had someone else quilt it, which turned out great, and it’s being shipped off this week to a hospice program for veterans. That is kind of hitting me in the chest. I hope it brings the veteran and their family some comfort.

More soon on other things I’ve made this year!

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Hey, guess what? I’m not dead! I just… didn’t touch my sewing machine for a full month. There was nothing gradual about the loss of mojo. I was cranking along, super-productive, and then suddenly dropped off the face of the earth. The reasons aren’t important – plenty of personal things, big and small, good and bad, that completely knocked me off my game and had me kind of curling in on myself for a few weeks.

The other night, I decided I was tired of not-sewing. That’s not exactly the same as wanting to sew again, but I wanted to want it. So I decided to push myself into the glorified closet that is my sewing room and fake it ’til I felt it.

Lo and behold, I finished up the blocks for a baby quilt, and the next day, I got the top put together. It was nice to feel that satisfaction again, of progress and seeing something come together the way I imagined it.

I need to figure out the back, and practice the quilting I want to do to make sure it will actually work, but I should be able to finish this one relatively soon. An April finish! Yes! It will happen!

When that’s done, I’m going to dig into the unfinished pile and hopefully make substantial progress on my mom’s Nicey Jane quilts. Wish me luck, and hopefully it’ll be less than a month before I’m back here again.

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Different quilts start in different places for me. Sometimes it starts with a color scheme or a stack of fabrics. Sometimes a design or a shape I’d like to make. Sometimes the whole thing seems to pop up almost fully-formed in my head, waiting to be executed.

This one started with the fabrics. Specifically, some of my long-hoarded, out-of-print Heather Ross fabrics, which were desperately waiting for just the right little boy. Almost directly from one of the Heather Ross prints, I was in love with the combination of aqua/sky, navy blue, and a reddish orange – no brown. Boyish without being TRUCKS AND PIRATES AND ALIENS, and appropriately preppy for the son of a pair of Manhattan lawyers.

The only question was – what to do with it all? I hit up my Pinterest boards, looking for something that would be quick and relatively simple, but not too boring. The one that jumped out at me was the Reunion Quilt from That girl… That quilt. So lovely! Simple patchwork made just a bit more interesting with some hourglass blocks thrown in.

Needless to say, this came together quickly, and I am so, so happy with how all of the fabrics work together. The solids in the half-square triangle and hourglass blocks, in case you’re wondering, are Kona Aqua, Tangerine, and Nightfall, with Snow.

The back is a polka dot I bought ages ago at Joann’s, as though it were always meant for this project. To bring it up to size, I added some more Nightfall and Tangerine (not easy colors to photograph, especially indoors in the winter!), as well as the light blue Lizzy House XO print.

I didn’t realize until I went back to link to the inspiration quilt how close to exactly the same quilting I did on mine. Whoops! I started out quilting either side of the horizontal seams, and then went back and quilted diagonally, every third block. So the whole thing has stayed nice and soft and minimally quilted, but I like that some of the squares have a diagonal or an X through them.

The binding is even more hoarded Heather Ross – a stripe from Lightning Bugs and Other Mysteries that I randomly scored a few years ago at my first Boston Modern Quilt Guild meeting.

So, off this quilt has flown to New York, to hopefully be loved and used and abused by Lucy‘s new little brother, James. Hope you love it, sweet boy! (And your mama, too.)

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Well, I would say my first month of project priorities was a success! I finished both quilts (Little Sister and Linc), and am totally up-to-speed on my Woodland Sampler. In addition to feeling good about actually accomplishing the goals, I really did find it helpful to have laid them out for myself. It kept me on-track at times when I was feeling a little squirrely and might have jumped onto something else before I finished the other projects. Or when one project had to be paused because I was waiting for backing fabric or something, I could feel like moving to another one of my priorities was productive instead of just being ADD.

So, on to February’s priority list! This will be a little challenging, since I’m going to be away for a week, plus the kids have school vacation for a week. But fingers crossed that I’ll get it done!

1. Baby boom quilt #2, a preppy bit of patchwork. The top is complete, I just need to figure out a back and finish it up.

2. Baby boom quilt #3, which I’m rather excited about. I have discovered my new favorite Kona Solid color: Nightfall. Oh, this photo doesn’t even do it justice, it is the most gorgeous twilight shade of navy blue. There’s going to be a lot of it, with a handful of yellows. I’m kind of excited for this design, I hope it turns out as pretty as it looks in my head.

3. Keep up with the Woodland Sampler. Can’t wait to fill in the one blue frame! I think this one will travel with me.

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Don’t even ask me why I decided to pick up cross-stitching. I don’t have enough time for all the things already in my life, the last thing I needed was another craft. And a pretty impractical one at that. I mean, at least when I’m making quilts, I know it’s a blanket that will keep someone warm and cozy. It’s likely to get used in a very tangible way. Same with knitting or crochet, both of which I loved for a while and then abandoned. But cross-stitch? I mean, what do you even DO with cross-stich? Stick it in a frame and hang it in your bathroom? That’s hardly my style.

But dangit, I couldn’t resist. I saw people tweeting about the Woodland Sampler and thought it would be a fun project, so I joined up. But then I figured I might want to, you know, try cross-stitching something before I started in on a year-long project. I came upon this pattern and decided to give it a go. If nothing else, at least I could feel good that the money was going to a good cause.

Well, I loved it. I love how satisfyingly precise and even those little stitches are. I love how easy it is, how it requires virtually no special skill or accuracy other than counting correctly (which, OK, is sometimes easier said than done). I love the fun patterns that are available now, especially the pixel people by weelittlestitches on Etsy. I picked up a few of those patterns when they were on sale and have been working them on and off when I get a chance.

So, now the Woodland Sampler is underway. When I signed up, I got a PDF pattern with all of the thread colors listed, as well as the layout for the frames. Then, each month I get a new pattern to fill in one of the frames. January’s was this sweet little deer couple. Cute, right?

The frames are finally complete and ready for the next months’ designs. It took longer than I imagined it would to finish all of those boxes, but again, it certainly wasn’t difficult. Just something to do while watching TV.

What will I do with this when it’s done? I haven’t got the faintest idea. And for now, I don’t really care. It’s just a fun project to work on and carry around with me.

It’s a mini baby boom in my world (none of them are mine, and let’s all be grateful for that). And, naturally, new babies need new quilts!

Here’s the first, for sweet Lincoln born in mid-December, a first baby for one of the groomsmen from our wedding. When I started to plan it, before he was born, I had to go gender-neutral since they weren’t going to find out what they were having. But pale greens and yellows just aren’t my cup of tea. And I had this lovely stack of rainbow charms that I had gotten from a swap at Sewing Summit. I thought it would be fun to do a zig-zag rainbow. (Or are we not saying zig-zag anymore? Just chevron? Sounds fancier that way.)

I actually had to laugh to myself, because it reminded me of a conversation I once had with a couple of crafty friends. We were talking about sewing for babies, and especially about designing quilts for baby boys. And someone came up with the greatest question to determine how adventurous you could be with the colors: how heteronormative are the parents? I’m not talking about whether they’re straight or not. I just find that some people, as parents, tend towards the more traditionally gendered colors than others, regardless of whether the parents themselves are straight or otherwise. Anyways, knowing this particular couple, I didn’t think anyone would feel threatened by a little color.

And to me, this is actually a really gender-neutral rainbow. Leaving out the purple makes it a little less feminine, and the gray background feels kind of urban and modern to me (this family lives in Brooklyn). And then the binding choice would let me tip it in one direction or another – in this case, a deep blue Lizzy House print.

The quilting is fairly dense, which meant it took a lot longer than I thought it should for such a small quilt. It also, unfortunately, made it not want to lie flat any more. But in addition to looking really cool, it gives the quilt some amazing texture. When I got to the gray, I gradually spaced out the lines to soften it up.

And because I used different color threads in each section of the rainbow, you get a little echo of it on the back of the quilt. The back, for once, is a single piece of a single fabric! Can you believe it, a non-pieced back?! It was refreshing.

If I was going to make this quilt again, the one thing I’d do differently is to make sure the blues were a more consistent hue/value. The fabrics I got in the swap were pretty varied, and some of them were a little too light and/or green-ish, so there isn’t as clear a contrast as I would have liked between the green and the blue. Regardless, though, I am happy with how this quilt turned out, and I hope it gets plenty of use in its new home!

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My stepsister, the youngest of the four of us, got married this past summer. It was a gorgeous affair, and my two older kids and I were in the wedding party. Six months later (ahem, I know, I suck), I have finally finished and sent off a wedding gift. But inspiration was swirling as soon as I saw her unexpectedly gorgeous flowers.

I admit to being a little skeptical of the purple-and-green color scheme she had chosen, but man did it turn out beautifully. The purples were a really gorgeous plum color, and the greens were light and springy. Throw in some silver (gray) accents and wedding whites, and you’ve got yourself a quilt.

I’m really happy with how these colors turned out, and I have some crowdsourcing to thank. I brought the fabrics to Sewing Summit (and added some while I was there), and had plenty of awesome people on hand to help me edit down the piles so they all played nicely together. I brought the completed blocks to a Boston Modern Quilt Guild meeting and had easily half a dozen people moving them here and there so the layout worked.

I had the back finished a few weeks ago, but saved the basting for last weekend’s BMQG meeting. Why? Because our meeting was in a gym with lots of open floor space! So much nicer than having to disassemble my dining room and yell at the dog to stay off the fabric. In case you’re wondering, that beautiful purple solid on the back is Kona Berry. Perfect fit for this quilt.

I didn’t want to quilt it too densely, because I wanted it to stay nice and soft. So I just did a really big, open, loopy meander all over. Not only did it turn out as I had hoped, but the whole thing (measuring about 65×75″) was done in a single sitting at my sewing machine. Yay for fast!

I considered a deep plum for the binding, but ultimately chose the subtler gray, since there was already plenty of purple on the back. And really, are Flea Market Fancy seeds ever a bad choice? Nope. Never. As a funny aside, I (again) crowdsourced the binding choice, totally forgetting that my sister is on Instagram. Thankfully, she “liked” the picture and commented that it was “one of her favorites.” I had to laugh, since I had just returned from the post office, shipping the very same quilt to her in Chicago. Hope she wasn’t just being nice!